Description

vacuumdb is a utility for
cleaning a PostgreSQL database.
vacuumdb will also generate
internal statistics used by the PostgreSQL query optimizer.

vacuumdb is a wrapper around
the SQL command VACUUM.
There is no effective difference between vacuuming databases via
this utility and via other methods for accessing the server.

Options

vacuumdb accepts the
following command-line arguments:

-a--all

Vacuum all databases.

[-d]
dbname[--dbname]
dbname

Specifies the name of the database to be cleaned or
analyzed. If this is not specified and -a (or --all) is not
used, the database name is read from the environment
variable PGDATABASE. If that is not
set, the user name specified for the connection is
used.

-e--echo

Echo the commands that vacuumdb generates and sends to the
server.

-f--full

Perform "full" vacuuming.

-q--quiet

Do not display a response.

-t table [ (column [,...]) ]--table table [ (column [,...]) ]

Clean or analyze table
only. Column names may be specified only in conjunction
with the --analyze option.

Tip: If you specify columns, you probably
have to escape the parentheses from the shell. (See
examples below.)

-v--verbose

Print detailed information during processing.

-z--analyze

Calculate statistics for use by the optimizer.

vacuumdb also accepts the
following command-line arguments for connection parameters:

-h host--host host

Specifies the host name of the machine on which the
server is running. If the value begins with a slash, it is
used as the directory for the Unix domain socket.

-p port--port port

Specifies the TCP port or local Unix domain socket file
extension on which the server is listening for
connections.

-U username--username username

User name to connect as

-W--password

Force password prompt.

Environment

PGDATABASEPGHOSTPGPORTPGUSER

Default connection parameters

This utility, like most other PostgreSQL utilities, also uses the
environment variables supported by libpq (see Section 29.12).

Diagnostics

In case of difficulty, see VACUUM and psql for
discussions of potential problems and error messages. The
database server must be running at the targeted host. Also, any
default connection settings and environment variables used by the
libpq front-end library will
apply.

Notes

vacuumdb might need to
connect several times to the PostgreSQL server, asking for a password
each time. It is convenient to have a ~/.pgpass file in such cases. See Section 29.13 for more information.

Examples

To clean the database test:

$ vacuumdb test

To clean and analyze for the optimizer a database named
bigdb:

$ vacuumdb --analyze bigdb

To clean a single table foo in a
database named xyzzy, and analyze a
single column bar of the table for the
optimizer: